One of the craziest things to happen in the past week is the shooting of Alex Pretti, a protester/obstructionist in the current insurrection occurring around ICE operations in Minneapolis, MN. The actual micro-facts of exactly how Pretti ended up getting shot by ICE agents are in dispute, which are where arguments occur nowadays.
But we can learn a lot about where our country’s memetics are by listening to the arguments around his killing. We know for example:
He had a pistol — a 9 mm Sig Sauer.
He had been involved in prior protests, and apparently had broken a rib.
He had a concealed carry permit for his handgun.
He was reacting to a woman in an altercation with ICE agents.
He was part of a Signal app text network that sent individuals to ICE arrest scenarios.
He’s dead.
What follows is more fascinating than just his death. What is interesting to me is HOW people discuss it.
The biggest element is his legality in carrying a gun into such a situation. The lower complexity discussion centers around whether he had a Second Amendment right to carry a pistol in that situation. I believe he absolutely did. Various people have argued that he didn’t have his papers on him. OK. Another correct, but ungrounded, low responsibility argument. Having papers stuffed in his pocket would not have prevented him from getting shot.
But what is completely ignored is whether he SHOULD have carried a gun.
When someone argues he had the right, what they’re really telling you is that the person speaking understands relationships as externally defined. He had the right to carry the gun. Society gave him that right. But what it doesn’t consider is his level of personal agency and independent responsibility in carrying it. It was lethally stupid to decontextualize his decision making into some kind of absolute right. And now he’s dead.
When I was involved in a lengthy Civil Disobedience campaign regarding protection of native wildlands in Idaho, we had a rule for the encampment I helped construct. NO GUNS. We had that rule because it was a good rule — that guns and the chaos inherent in protest, civil or illegal, don’t mix. And that guns far too often give law enforcement a reason to shoot you. And while the legal part may grind on, if you’re on the receiving end of a bullet, you’re still likely to be dead. Activists involved in the campaign did all sorts of crazy stuff — from living in trees, to extended blockades of roads. But NO activists were killed.
And the cops had guns. You better believe it. As the campaign dragged on, US Forest Service law enforcement even upped their training/recruitment, and produced essentially Special Forces, trained to go into the forest after activists, who were pulling all sorts of shenanigans to slow down logging activities. These guys had machine guns, the whole bit. Yet not one activist was shot in the whole crazy shitshow that were the latter years of the Cove-Mallard campaign.
The reason that we did not carry guns was because we were GROUNDED in reality. It wasn’t that hard to figure out someone would get shot in the context of the largely peaceful protests (there was vandalism, make no mistake about it.). But we were independently thoughtful. And the structure of the campaign promoted agency. Anyone wanting to do “night work” was people the rest of us did NOT want to hear about. People organized themselves into Affinity Groups of 2-3 people, and no one wanted to hear about anyone’s plans, unless it was a formal public action that was intended to be a demonstration, for media consumption. In fact, the way our brains were wired at the time, if SOMEONE wanted to hear, that probably meant they were a fed. And we had a few.
What Alex Pretti’s shooting shows, more than anything else, is not how ICE has changed. It shows the principles I’ve discussed in this piece — that the Left has become ungrounded from the actual reality of their actions. If you’re rushing a cop, and you are wearing a weapon, and you DON’T get shot, that’s a miracle. What is fascinating is to see how the Left is papering over the shooting, somehow trying to re-write rules of engagement with law enforcement, that now cops must delay action in an altercation if they see someone with a gun. The only thing that LEOs will do in that situation is exactly what they did to Alex Pretti. Unload a clip into him.
Attempting to have the system take revenge on itself is a more than cynical maneuver by leadership to create martyrs.
I’ve got some bad news. Ain’t gonna happen. And Pretti paid the price.
One of my favorite pieces of mental work that I figured out in the old noggin is this piece here — the origins of memetic conflict that happens when different value systems collide. In order to completely grok it, you’re going to have to read a little about v-Memes — it’s not that hard. But the short answer is that when different societies, based on different social structures, run into each other over contested ground, how evolved those systems are will definitely decide the outcome.
The short version is that in the classic Spiral Dynamics progression of societies — Survival, Tribal, Authoritarian, Legalistic, Performance-Based, Communitarian and on into the Second Tier — misunderstanding and conflict will depend on the memetic spacing of levels between the two conflicting social structures. Two levels (e.g. between Tribal and Legalistic) will result in Incomprehension — the two systems cannot understand each other. Three levels? What I describe as the Insanity/Barbarism conflict, which is what is happening currently in the conflict over ICE in Minnesota.
Here’s the social structures from Don Beck as a refresher.
Through a complicated path, mostly committed by psychopaths seizing control of dominant foundational myths in the Lefty Noosphere, the current Democratic Party has reverted primarily to Tribal knowledge structures. That drives emergent focus on Donald Trump as some version of The Great Satan, and a pathology across Lefties of all stripes, but especially their intellectual caste, with what is called Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). The justification for TDS is honestly monotonous, and is an exemplar of how higher knowledge structures that may have been present in individuals, necessarily simplify and rigidify when downconverted into Tribal forms. Trump is evil, Trump is corrupt, Trump is buddies with Epstein and a pedophile, and so on. No amount of context can derail this myth structure, other than the Left being forced to recognize that Trump is still President.
This is powerful when coded into some form of exchangeable morality — numerous folks don’t have to know much to “virtue signal” — communicate to others in the tribe their status through ostensible piety, of these foundational myths. It IS true that most of these Tribal myths are all centered around “Trump as a dishonorable, evil man.” The problem is that the world is a more complex place than whether you hate Donald Trump or not. And to some extent, the Republicans aren’t helping much, either. The current Republican administration is hardcore Performance/Goal-Based thinking. The one thing that matters is getting done whatever the governing item is. And Trump engages in constant negotiations with his adversaries, obviously due to his background as a New York real estate mogul.
This comes off as absolutely insane to the Lefty In-group/Out-group Tribalists, who, with poor consequential thinking, cannot perceive how they’ve been co-opted by their parasitic psychopath class, who had prior to Trump and Elon Musk showing up, had established a rich vein of revenue through exploitation of face-value virtue-laden topics that the majority of their base had lapped right up. “USAID is saving starving kids in Africa!” is one of my favorites. Why? I worked for USAID in Egypt, and had the surreal opportunity of seeing how they actually worked. I was window dressing for some competing ruling faction in Egypt at the time, supposedly working on a fertilizer plant control system, which then was one of the projects providing cover for the deep political machinations going on, facilitated by political US meddling. The end result of which was the Arab Spring, one of the original Color Revolutions, which did not quite go the way we planned.
The larger Republican Party is not completely Performance-based. There are still components that have strong Authoritarian bents (the Christian Right) as well as a large institutional caste of actors, named along with their Democratic counterparts, the Deep State, occupying the Legalistic v-Meme. If the Republicans seem diffuse as far as worldview, it’s because they are. While the Democrats are spiraling out of control on pure Tribalism, the Republicans face a queasy coalition centered around less government and traditional government favors to corporations and businesses. Which is problematic, because while the Democrats can coalesce around absolutely insane myths, like gender identity is only determined by how a person feels today. And because of their simplicity, these information structures are truncated, based on emotional appeal and very viral.
And so we end up in the current disaster in Minneapolis. In the last few weeks, two “activists” have been shot and killed. Theoretically, these “activists” are somehow nonviolent Legal Observers and merely traveling around after ICE and documenting arrests made by ICE. The videos of what actually is happening, and other recent disclosures regarding their organization, do, in no way shape or form, support any of this. The activists are extremely well-organized and coordinated in a network where individuals are dispatched via the messaging app Signal to tail ICE vehicles, and upon arriving on the scene, disrupt ICE arrests of illegal immigrants. When they arrive, they act literally like insane monkeys on meth, often closing distance with ICE agents face-to-face, while blowing whistles and horns. With the recent information regarding Signal app organizing, it is my belief that they could actually be considered a criminal conspiracy, subject to Racketeering Influence and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) sanctions.
Of course, the PROBLEM is within the context of their Tribal situation, sprinkled with fragmented myths about Constitutional function, is that they don’t perceive themselves as a criminal operation. Self awareness is pathetically low. And that is deeply problematic when dealing with the outside world. The second person shot, Alex Pretti, a 37 year old ER nurse — far past the age to rationalize this kind of behavior with youthful ignorance, showed up for his round in the “chase the ICE agents and harass them” sporting a handgun — a Sig Sauer 9mm. One of the unbreakable rules in my world, when I was helping run a large civil disobedience campaign, was NO GUNS. You don’t have guns at a protest, because if things go south, and sometimes they do, LEOs can kill you legally. And then you’re dead.
This particular type of Sig Sauer also has a handling misfire problem, and if dropped, can go off. It’s also no surprise to me that it was an ER nurse who made such a bad judgment call. ER staff were the worst of the COVID alarmist crowd, and there’s also no question that trauma can stack up and cause erratic reactions in stressful situations. Immediately, the propaganda side on the Left seized on the notion that Alex had a legal concealed carry permit, and in the classic distortion of thought that is haunting the Left nowadays, put that in the blender and came out with “ICE needs to adapt their tactics to support Legal Observers’ Second Amendment rights to carry hand guns into violent situations and conflicts with ICE officers.” Are you kidding me?
Even while they’re acting like meth-crazed monkeys. I watched the videos involving the incident where the gun went off (my guess is likely a misfire) and then what happened is what can happen in any LEO arrest scenario. Once the cop thinks either he or his buddy is under threat from a firearm, the cop will proceed to empty their clip into the suspect. Which usually means a dead perp. Much was also made in this Lefty propaganda round about how he was defending a woman “activist/Legal observer.” The clip I saw didn’t include the prior where she got into it with the ICE agents. But I’ve been in enough situations to know that a certain subset of women will fly off the handle, and believe they are the reincarnation of an invincible Valkyrie, and aggressively attack even LEOs. Call it the Mama Bear Social Control response. I even trained my two sons, now ages 25 and 27, when they were 16 and 18, what to do in a situation with potential law enforcement involvement (say a fight at a party.). They are both strapping young lads, and they both know that they are supposed to grab their girlfriends and run like hell, preferably before the cops show up. And if the girlfriend is dancing on his arm, screaming about her honor, and won’t leave — then ditch her. Cops will always threat-assess, and my two sons are 6’3″ and 6’5″. Which means one is going on the bumper with the bracelets, and the other is going in the backseat of the cruiser. The cop is not going to care about any dancing fairy princess.
Once again, the arguments from the Left to support their position are the result of projection and supposition — perceived moral order. Not validity grounding with anything resembling reality. I think it’s hard to understand this completely. I think a lot of the people involved in the obstruction of ICE in MN are likely middle-class, and have little to no experience with law enforcement. So they view themselves as White Knights, endorsed by their communities, and encouraged by local and state leadership in these actions. They view that because these various state and local officials have endorsed their moral position, and said they are brave and courageous, that somehow these ostensibly powerful people will rescue them. Little do they realize that their distorted sense of morality has no real power in a federal courtroom. And the other key fact is that they also are patsies ripe for disavowal by exactly those same individuals.
And what to think of the state and other government officials encouraging the insurrection? They’re locked in a deal with utter personal destruction once all is revealed. There’s tons of Somali daycare and medical service fraud that it is simply impossible to believe local and state officials either ignored, or were directly on the take. Fraud in Blue States is going to be an emergent issue in the coming New Year. While the Minnesota cabal, including Tim Walz and his lieutenant governor, Peggy Flanagan, seem to be mostly passively raking in the cash, and NOT involving the crazy gangland violence on the US southern border, it still means that this will be certainly the end of their political careers and inflated standard of living (Walz has already stepped down from running in the next election.)
But there are larger implications nationally. It’s through a glass darkly on what has been going on in our western southern tier, whose political caste is thoroughly intertwined with far more malevolent actors than the displaced Somali pirates in Ohio and Minnesota. You don’t have to stretch the Overton Window too far to see how the CIA facilitated Somali immigration, starting in the ’90s. But most of what came across the southern border during Joe Biden’s disastrous presidency came courtesy of the Sinaloan and other cartels. Walz and his crooked cohort may just end their lives in the big house. But that’s not the same for the various political forces across California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. The cartels are fond of torture and execution. And the Pandora’s box of inflated human trafficking revenue that happened through the betrayal of the Biden administration, and in particular Alejandro Mayorkas, has collapsed. No real natural born killer is going to take that lying down. The cockroaches are going to eat themselves.
Getting back to the primary point of this piece — the Left has left itself open to destruction in the context of memetic understanding by viewing the current administration as insane. They’re not. The problem is the flip side of the memetic conflict is that the Right views them as barbarians, which is decidedly not how the Left views themselves. The Left better get over its fascination with its self-generated moral order, and quick. The federal government, as well as most of the country, is nowhere near the point of collapse. And while the Left may not view themselves that way, the Trump administration, especially in the context of its goal-oriented focus of clearing out illegal aliens doesn’t give a shit about their moral order. They possess the reins of law and order on their side. And in the end, law and order are popular with the general population.
And as the effects of brainwashing using permission structures, started by David Axelrod and Barack Obama, wash off, my bet is no one is going to give a damn about the ginned up Lefty moral order that was potentially not created, but certainly accelerated, during the fractured COVID years. And grounding back to reality is brutal. It involves arcing.
And that means someone is going to get severely burned.
Tool Cabinet, 2026. In case you’re wondering, I use ~ 5 of these for 95% of my woodworking.
I am writing this on Sunday, January 4, functionally the day after US Delta Force troops seized the head of the Venezuelan government, Nicholas Maduro, from the Presidential Palace in Caracas. To call it audacious would be an understatement. A coordinated force, launched primarily from an offshore fleet, mobilized helicopters, a slew of different aircraft types, including a B1-B!, and successfully evaded detection by Chinese radar long enough to destroy the entire Chinese armament Venezuela had imported. It is unclear, at least to me, the extent that the Iranians had constructed drone factories inside Venezuela, but I suspect these were hit as well. Talk about a bad investment.
If you had to pick a scenario to illustrate the complexity crisis in memetics, you couldn’t pick a more profound example. The Left immediately condemned snatching Maduro, a mass murderer by anyone’s yardstick, under the worn-out aegis of colonialism, while Venezuelans themselves were dancing in the street. Immediately, the anti-colonial propaganda machine spun up the usual condemnations of the invasion, saying it was oil for Trump’s buddies as the primary reason for the war — a claim they have been pre-bunking for a while, in an attempt to discredit the sinking of drug running boats and submersibles out of the Venezuelan ports as being in the interest of the United States. As their lede goes, there can be no legitimate external or internal action to preserve the United States — as the most hegemonic, evil state in history, we’ve gotta go down.
Fortunately, not everyone in the current government agrees with them. The information flows in the country, increasingly complicated, and not supportable by the sophistication of the previous bureaucracy, was going to simplify and decentralize. Those are the memetic physics, and you cannot run from that. But the how of that transition matters a great deal to those of us that live here. MAGA has attempted to be turned into a slur by the Democrats — but for those of us that live here, and are not planning on exiting to a Riviera, Mexican, French or otherwise, has widespread support as a guiding principle. That doesn’t mean that the lumpenproletariat has any clue what actions this actually entails, other than not giving away a ton of foreign aid to other countries. But certainly, allowing Russia and China to build up a military force on the other side of the Gulf of America isn’t such a hot idea. That is definitely not in the national interest.
And so a realignment of the Venezuela junta, that spent a good hunk of time publicly declaring its hatred for America, was really inevitable. Those in power, and in the know, who do NOT want to leverage collapse to add to their personal family fortunes, were sooner or later going to be all in. It’s one thing to have a socialist/communist government in our hemisphere down at the tail of South America. It’s quite another to have one on your doorstep.
What’s amazing is that Venezuela, as a failed narco-state, is such an obvious one. Here’s a hint how you can tell. Any failed state will be accompanied by refugee outflows of the middle and upper classes before the peasantry starts hoofing it for the border. If you can get out, you get out. I got a window into that last year when I visited Costa Rica. Conversations with locals indicated that Venezuelan teachers, doctors and whatnot were showing up quite a while ago. What WAS interesting was that in places like El Salvador, who experienced their mass migration before President Nayeb Bukele took office, the Venezuelans merely showed up into empty slots that were waiting for them. So maybe, just maybe, the signal that should have been heeded was lost on the rest of the world — the bourgeoisie simply were too busy re-settling in their new environs.
But any country hemorrhaging its people is a failed state. People don’t leave until they have to. The semi-official number of people fleeing is in the neighborhood of 8 million, out of a country of approximately 28 million. That’s gotta be up there with Cambodia at the end of the US Vietnam period.
It should be said that any narco-state does not have the interests of the U.S. at heart. The drug war has metastasized into a full-on tool of internal destruction inside the U.S. Once again, numbers are hard to come by (amazingly). But at least 1/2 million Americans have died in the last ten years. What is even more tragic is the number of children — I deep-dove this figure and came up with about 5000 in the last ten years. That means 500 kids/year are dying from fentanyl poisoning. Because drug overdose is often self-administered, the old mental models get spun up in varying ways about the responsibility for the deaths. But kids are kids — and even if they’re 17, they mostly get a break regarding total accountability for their actions.
Why are we so stuck in the current situation? We’ve got the mass death at our door. But we simply cannot change our mental models on what non-kinetic warfare really looks like. In a best case scenario, we should sort allies from adversaries on whether they are cracking down on production of fentanyl and associated chemicals inside their borders. Yet the fentanyl still streams from China, as well as Venezuela, and especially Mexico. If you cannot control production of chemicals inside your own country, if you’re not registered as a failed state, you’re damn close. Or if not a failed state, a true adversary.
And at a minimum, those states and their justifications are the last thing we should be listening to. It’s a war, folks, like it or not. You pay attention to your adversaries. But you don’t suck up their propaganda.
Understanding the Venezuela crisis also requires shattering of old models of how we perceive how we operate in our own hemisphere. Whether we exercised the Monroe Doctrine or not, we believed it to be true. But that’s not what has been happening Everyone from non-state actors like Hezbollah, to the usual suspects of Russia and China, have been operating in Venezuela. And their actions are profoundly not in our interests. But the American public can’t even conceive that Lebanese terrorists could be running around in our literal backyard. It never comes up in any discussions I read. And the fact that it took Trump drawing that hard line against them is more a sign of past managerial neglect towards the American empire than anything else. Once you get your government filled with enough globalists and collapse advocates, this kind of thing was inevitable. We are the world. Indeed.
And the connections between Iran and Venezuela are indisputable. Iranian drones were being manufactured in Venezuela. Do people really think that they were going to be used against Trinidad? But it’s all so fantastic, and requires a knowledge of geography elusive to the modern American, we end up back with the notion that it’s another war for oil. Look folks, oil is fungible — and what that means is that oil from Texas looks like oil from Venezuela like oil from Saudi Arabia, once you mess around a little with the chemistry and sulfur content. The per-barrel price is the only thing that dictates who gets it. But who gets the money FROM it does change. And that’s the North Star of how to understand any oil-related crisis.
What’s more interesting is tracking the stuff that is scarce. This piece by Tracy ShuChart (on Substack) is a must-read for all Illuminati wannabes. Venezuela turns out to be a much bigger play than oil. And as China attempts to use its various rare earth surpluses as a political tool to bring the US to heel — not too much, because if we stop buying their junk, their own middle class will revolt — Venezuela shows up there, conveniently, as a potential proxy supplier. If we had a news media that had some sense (we don’t — they are mostly composed of traitorous, whining fools) these folks would be getting out a global map and the red yarn to tie together the network China is using to corner the market on all the stuff, like tantalum and coltan, that makes all our new spooky devices actually work. So if you were China, why wouldn’t you reach out to an ally with no scruples, who could in combo form, kill off your adversary’s children with fentanyl, while destroying their supply chain for all their high tech? And why wouldn’t you help that same partner stock up on suicide bombers, still smarting from all the US action in the Middle East? It’s one helluva play — but if it went off, the chaos generated would be spectacular.
And the United States Lefty corps will be there to pre-bunk everything, and keep us in a state of paralytic senescence. We deserved it after all. Black Lives Mattered — until they became inconvenient as well.
If there’s a lesson here, it’s that any functional state needs a national interest. And that national interest needs to be grounded and real. And the US is allowed to have one.It gets back to the whole Collapse Narrative thing I’ve been writing about. The short form for the cheap seats in the back — you can always tell a Collapse Narrative by its lack of anything other than babbling moral principles. It’s not that principles don’t matter. But if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.
One of the most preposterous Collapse Narratives is that by snatching Maduro, somehow China and Russia are emboldened in their own personal territorial quests. “If they did that, we can do what WE want.” So far, Russia and China have proved to be far more rational, self-interested actors than that. They ain’t out there for world peace, folks. And any nation that would help create the chemicals for fentanyl production is no real friend of ours. When they see us grab Maduro, they know the marble game is for keeps. And only seditious traitors like Mark Kelley, the Senator from Arizona, are going to try to spin it differently. China and Russia aren’t going to feel like the door is more open for their own territorial adventurism. They’re going to know that if we say something is important to us, we mean it. That’s the way functional hegemons work. And ALL nation-states are their own little hedgehogs. Don’t fool yourself.
None of this means that the runway to a bright future for Venezuela is free and clear. Left in place are the various junta members that helped Maduro do the bad stuff he did. But they are a bunch of rats — that’s what happens to your soul when you justify killing your own people. Trump has announced that we’re going to run Venezuela (Marco Rubio must be rubbing his brow), and I’m sure part of that message was that he was gonna kill them if they didn’t do what he asked them to do. Sometimes, the way you approach societal evolution is to have your leadership order it. And then hope that it takes. To a far lesser degree, it’s what I do in my own classes in design.
But success in Venezuela is going to be hinged on one thing — remigration of its professional class. Our job has to be giving Venezuelans enough hope for a new society that those people will come back. Because societies fundamentally run on information and information complexity. But in order to have information complexity, you’ve got to first have information.
I’m saying a prayer for Venezuela. And crossing my fingers as well. We could use a little luck about now.
And don’t forget — sometimes you go the Great Game. But sometimes, the Great Game comes to you.
The Parthenon — One of the interesting things about it is how small it is — Athens, Greece
On a personal note, it’s super-depressing to be writing about the events of the past week on the day before Thanksgiving. Hoping these simply pass means that when you unearth this post a couple of years from now, you won’t know what I’m talking about.
Last week, six Democratic senators decided to make a large-scale announcement on X, telling the troops of the US Military that they didn’t have to obey “illegal” orders. They didn’t give any examples of illegal orders, doing nothing but admonishing the rank-and-file with the implication that Trump has in the past given them illegal orders, and that at a minimum, they need to be insubordinate to these. As I said, there are no examples — just a broad brush telling them of the oath to the Constitution. The Constitution itself is notoriously sparse when it comes to telling the military exactly how to run itself, other than members of the Army and Navy (that’s all there was at the time) should obey the orders of the Commander in Chief, and the Commander in Chief was the President of the United States. I don’t think our Founding Fathers quite anticipated the psychopathic information wars (they were not totally naive to the ways of manipulation, but still) we are encountering today. I kinda think they wouldn’t have imagined senators and congress-critters as using gross stupidity as a defense, or the notion that language should be parsed without any implication.
But here we are — where we’ve had the Democratic Party shrieking that the current President is a fascist (once again, total Humpty Dumpty with this word.). For those that need a Humpty Dumpty refresher, showing psychopathic manipulation was alive and well even during Lewis Carroll’s day, here’s the famous quote from Through the Looking Glass —
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
What is fascinating, if you follow this blog, is the memetic tricks being played by the various actors — in particular Mark Kelly, D-AZ. While he admonishes the military rank-and-file (he is a decorated veteran and Space Shuttle pilot) in a tone that implies they’re being given illegal orders, he beats feet away from this position in subsequent interviews. He poses his comments as some kind of avuncular reminder to the troops as a post-statement interpretation. It’s totally whack, of course. But decide for yourself. (Youtube has problems embedding in WordPress pages, but the link should work.)
Arguing against the original posting by the Six is a fools errand, and I won’t do it here. But what is fascinating is the Six surf the wave of memetic understanding, arguing that what is obviously a context-laden message, full of insinuation, should be taken literally and completely fragmented, and out of context. The perpetrators use memetic simplicity, along with a follow-on message of assertion of the First Amendment as their escape hatch. They have the right to say anything they want, of course, and they get to pull the Humpty Dumpty.
When Trump responded on X and Truth Social by angrily reminding them that basically what they have done could be considered an act of sedition, punishable by hanging, there’s a cascade of angry pearl-clutching in unison across the entire Left. What’s wild is that they all ran Trump’s statement of fact into “Trump wants to hang all of us.” Well, he might, but Trump didn’t say that at all. They are counting on psychopathic manipulation — clever deletion of a few words, while counting on the Neo-tribal politics I discuss in this piece to hold sway. The Left has spent the last nine or so years demonizing Trump — certainly the public must realize he is an illegitimate President, disposable by violence.
What is wild is that the Left continues to lay ground for what is known as a Color Revolution. And what is a Color Revolution? From ChatGPT –
Large-scale public demonstrations calling for political reform or resignation of leaders.
Unified branding (e.g., a color, flower, or simple symbol on clothing, banners, etc.).
Civil resistance tactics such as marches, strikes, and occupation of public spaces.
Rapid mobilization often sparked by disputed elections, corruption, or economic crises.
Focus on nonviolent action, although violence may occur around the edges.
This Color Revolution is focused on Trump, obviously, in attempts to brand him as a fascist and some kind of ersatz King. Even considering the argument a year into Trump’s Presidency is exhausting. The force of the current Color Revolution derives from endless haranguing using generic terms that the general public really can’t define. If Trump was a real fascist, the various operatives on the Left would at a minimum be in jail, and likely have already been executed. But the drumbeat of social media repetition goes on. The immiseration process never stops.
And the people doing this are pros. One of the Seditious Six, Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) is a former CIA officer. Her bio is incomplete, but it doesn’t take much reading in between the lines that she helped subvert active organizations for a living. The others are trading on their service records in a “how could I possibly want to subvert the government” sleight of hand.
As of tonight, November 26, there have two National Guard members critically injured by an illegal immigrant from Afghanistan. There’s no question that the constant direct emboldening by specific members of the Seditious Six contributed to the atmosphere allowing these killings. Slotkin herself was warning that National Guard members were likely to start shooting US citizens in the various cities that they’ve been deployed to only last week, which translates to legitimacy of various aggrieved parties taking shots of their own. It’s going to be a wild week seeing how this latest development gets spun.
If there’s one particularly execrable, gaslighting icon in our journalistic night, it would have to be The Atlantic. Owned basically by Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’ widow, it is a textbook piece of narcissistic fabulism — a complex brew of half truths, polemics, and status elevators set in front of a background of a lack of reporting on a variety of issues. It is an amazing example of the manipulation of what I call the “dark matter” of the information space. The Atlantic counts on you NOT being exposed to the other side of the story.
And when this dynamic is combined with structurally sound writing by top professionals — truth be damned — the structural coherence of the prose is very compelling for making and changing narratives inside the brains of the readership. It’s a magazine of perfect, pathological brainworms for the predisposed readership on the Left. Look at the success of write Ed Yong, who ended up winning a Pulitzer Prize for his largely incorrect take on COVID, that contributed to the panic of millions, and destruction of trillions of dollars in economic value.
The latest thing to fly across The Atlantic’s radar is the recent Department of War attacks on Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan narco-cartel, who are busy importing all the necessary ingredients for fentanyl production into the Unite States. Primarily a problem within the last ten years, fentanyl abuse hits people that no one really cares about in society. As such, the need to take care of their problems are largely sublimated, and then occasionally used as a psychopathic moral racket by the Left. Legal NGO industries around homeless people, who are often fentanyl addicts, have sprung up around supplying needles, homes, substitutes and conditions, all funded through a variety of local and state governments. Why would the Left want to solve the fentanyl crisis? They’re making bank.
In the background of all these efforts has been the cultural drumbeat that source interdiction doesn’t work. That drugs, even if they’re not legal, should be almost legal. And swimming upstream against this notion will get you banned inside an increasingly exclusionary Left.
So in walks Trump, determined to end the potential national gaslighting on this issue. Trump orders his Secretary of War to start sinking the boats bringing the requisite chemicals, or the product itself, into the US. Governments like the Venezuelan government are marginally legal in and of themselves, and the globe is a big place. The idea that, considering the enormous amount of money in the drug trade, there are not going to be quasi-illegal narco states is ridiculous.
So Trump sends the Navy and the US Coast Guard out to just sink the boats – a classic Gordian knot perspective. It’s not very hard to identify them — satellite telemetry show boats filled with barrels, stacked in an orderly fashion, right before their sinking. Some of the boats are really submersibles — they ride just under the surface of the ocean. No one is fishing off these boats.
Venezuelan drug-running submersible, sunk by the USN
Here’s where things get interesting. The problem of fentanyl interdiction has been intractable. At the same time, the US has been fighting a quasi-narco state that has been busy shipping its military-aged men here. The Venezuelan government, through corruption and mismanagement, has created such an internal crisis that its entire professional class has run out of its own country to roughly adjacent states in Central America. The government continues to fund itself, at least in part, with money from cartels. It has continued as well to threaten its more peaceful neighbors like Guyana. Short version — the bad guy chits keep piling up.
But what side does one of the primary writers for The Atlantic line up on? Persistence of current paths of action are a Collapse Narrative. What we’re doing now is definitely not stopping the running of fentanyl and supplies into the US. At the same time, the rule of law to prevent the trafficking has obviously broken down, and brandishing it as a weapon against US military action only serves to further weaken the USA.
And there’s little concern for that consequentiality exhibited by Friedersdorf – just an assertion of a moral racket. The lives of the drug runners are paramount, and the people suffering in the US are incidental. One of the first things that popped into my head is that when Trump sank a couple of these obvious drug runners, the word would spread that this is really a great way, if you’re a local, to be guaranteed to get killed. The gloves are off — Trump is going to defend an appropriate locus of his constituency, and this is a profound sea change in the messaging being spread internationally. In a memetic sense, Trump is forcing the Venezuelan and Colombian drug lords, and especially their minions, down into a Survival v-Meme crisis. But such actions are intolerable to Friedersdorf. Collapse and anarchy is the game, and forcing drug interdiction agents to jump through hoops is the path forward.
It is fair to ask — Does Trump’s strategy work? Look at the ‘intractable’ border crisis. Since Trump was elected, illegal immigration into the US has also collapsed. The dominant Collapse Narrative, that illegal immigration was fundamentally unstoppable, has been proven to be a sham.
I’ve written about how this works from an empathy perspective in this piece on Moral Heat Maps. The reality is, at this point in time, that at least in the Trump administration, the actors are far more grounded and pragmatic in how they get results that the current Lefties, which remain committed to the collapse of the US.
Whether Trump’s strategies will actually work or not remains to be seen. But the way the elites veritably seethe when they declare his philosophies “populist” gives me some hope. And if you want to hedge on all this, buy Yamaha stock. That seems to be the brand for most of the outboards used on the drug boats, now on their way to Davy Jones’ locker.
One of the craziest things that’s happened in the last six or so years is the blatant injection of speech control by the Left in all aspects of what I’ve called Collapse Narratives. What is a Collapse Narrative? It is the story and framing of a “moral racket” to bully others into silence, and that if you follow the narrative thread, your society will collapse. “If you say that, not only are you evil, but we will ostracize you from society AND kill the baby panda. And it will be ALL YOUR OWN FAULT.”
The technique works best when utilizing sexual taboos, which the psychopaths are allowed to discuss in celebration. But if you protest, you are (pick one or all) a bigot, a racist, and so on. And you better shut up.
No better example could be found than when Sam Brinton, former undersecretary in the Department of Energy, in charge of nuclear waste disposal went on various tours promoting his kink, which I can’t quite characterize. It involves being surrounded by other men dressed up in leather dog costumes, complete with butt plug tails inserted into their poopers.
Brinton was later dismissed for a particularly pernicious habit he had of stealing other people’s luggage off airport baggage carousels, then going home and wearing the dresses in public.
But while Brinton was in play, we, the public, were subjected to what I’d call “Walsh’s Progression” (credit to Matt Walsh at the Daily Wire) regarding all this psychopathic nonsense. We were supposed to Tolerate this reprehensible behavior, followed by Accept this as normative, then forced to Celebrate this as somehow adding to the modern cultural zeitgeist, leading to Normalization, and ending, of course, in Coercion and Punishment if you can’t follow the script.
All these types of manipulations depend on the psychopathic entity violating taboos and norms in society, followed by a pronouncement that only they are allowed to discuss this. The only allowable response across society is sycophancy. What they are promoting is usually, by their standards, some ostensibly necessary sexual deviancy. Why does it have to center around that deviancy, in the larger psychosocial picture? Because it mainstreams a channel for sexual abuse, mostly directed at children, who once traumatized, will then increase the odds of them developing a personality disorder and joining the ranks. It’s a combo psychosocial control/memetic reproductive act.
And that’s why it’s necessary to be done in public, especially publics containing children. It simply doesn’t work behind closed doors.
To repeat — psychopaths take taboo subjects, self-identify, demand acceptance and then use these to shut down broader debate. And because these subjects are ALREADY taboo in the larger cultural zeitgeist (call it polite society), it’s not that hard a task.
Let’s take another example — illegal immigration. While LEGAL immigration policy is a debatable good, illegal immigration is truly a consolidated blight on society. They are not the same. Illegal immigration often involves human trafficking. And human trafficking is inordinately profitable, both for the Mexican cartels that pipeline people into the US, as well as the various entities in the US exploiting the labor.
How does this work? Let’s say you are a contractor bidding a federal contract. You must bid this contract at prevailing wage rates, or it will be rejected. But if you fill your workforce with illegal aliens, you can likely pay these people half or less that same wage rate, resulting in a windfall for you. This becomes money that both you and the cartels can pump into the political machine to “look the other way” in whatever regional market you occupy.
Now pour on the psychopathic messaging. “These are hardworking families (growing dope in Ventura County.) “If you don’t support them, you’re a racist!” and so on. One pours on the messaging because there is an extensive web of government support services that are also profiting off the existence of these people, with housing, food and medical assistance, all part of the associated moral racket. “They are only looking for a better life, you monster!” And unless you’re made of sterner stuff (like me) you’re going to wilt.
Folks on the other side can’t even open their mouths regarding the very immediate impact to their own circumstance — especially in adjacent, poor communities. In the Scandinavian countries, rapes increased some 50% from baseline with the importation of migrants from Africa. And heaven forbid if you actually discuss the demographics of the illegal migrants — mostly young men in their 20s and 30s, and the inevitable characteristics of letting in an uneducated army into your country, while housing and feeding them. It’s all booby-trapped with psychopathic taboos designed to make you keep your mouth shut.
It’s even difficult for me, writing in the abstract, to imagine using the very real argument that my friends’ daughters will increase the chance of them being raped by allowing this illegal wave in.
That’s the power of psychopathic taboos.
One can also see the extreme reaction from the Left on this issue against Donald Trump. Tom Homan, Trump’s deportation czar, attacks the psychopaths head on. Instead of deferring to their manipulation of taboos, he confronts them with stories of direct experience. But because the majority of our mainstream media has abandoned their own ethics, or are willingly supporting the psychopaths, there is no amplification.
And, as with all things psychopathic, in the v-Meme space, the psychopaths take any dissent, as well as detail, and shove it down into the macerator of reality. The only “appropriate” response is conformity. And that requires relational disruption and loss of agency — THE key psychopathic identifiers — for all adjacent actors. And so the folks responding to the use of these psychopathic taboos march down into Tribal v-Meme knowledge structures of myths about past immigration. Nuance or reasonable policy is not acceptable.
Do the psychopaths know they’re doing this? I think the ones at the top do. But much of this turns into an emergent cascade — once the masters at the top, interested in some strange brew of anarchy, chaos and low level control, set the tune, the local dynamics of relationships comes into play. Understanding the complex web of both illegal actors, and legal institutions in perpetuation of all this strains the brains of all but a few of us.
Diabolical.
What’s the remedy? The modest thing is resist the psychopath’s efforts to rename pathological behaviors into more palatable forms. Don’t use the language of the psychopath. Call illegal immigration “illegal immigration” — not undocumented workers. Do not use the phrase “children’s gender affirming care.” Call it child castration. You’ll see an immediate revulsion for describing these various things as they are. But if we cannot reclaim the language, we will see the psychopaths carry the day on the field.
Weippe Prairie, North Central Idaho – to the left of the barn is a 2000′ deep canyon
As I write this, for those that, in the future, won’t be able to place the date, we are still in the middle of Israel and Iran bombing and launching missiles at each other. Last night, there was a declared ceasefire brokered, or imposed (depending on your perspective) by Donald Trump, after airstrikes on the nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan in Iran. For context, we are in such a bizarre blending of the information space, I decided to write to give some context for people hearing absurd things about the state of Iran.
I write this as someone with a profound personal connection to Iran. My father was a Tudegh member back in the early ’50s — the Iranian Communist party — that supported Mohammed Mossadegh, the moderate and truly progressive leader that was overthrown by the CIA in 1953. Led by Kermit Roosevelt, the coup installed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi as the king/dictator as the leader of Iran. The secret police in Iran, called Savak, and allied with our own CIA, killed my uncle during this time period, though I’m unsure exactly of the timeline. My father, a revolutionary himself, tells the story of how he came to leave Iran thusly. He was standing before a checkpoint with a briefcase full of pamphlets, and realized that if he crossed that checkpoint and got discovered, Savak would shoot him on sight.
So he threw his satchel in the ditch, turned around, and started the process to take him to America – the very country that was working so diligently to kill him. My father was a doctor, and at the same time all this chaos was occurring, East Coast hospitals were sweeping major metropolitan areas in Iran to recruit physicians who would be brought to these same medical facilities. They would occupy a role as kind of “super-nurses” — indentured, but not given staff positions at the hospitals, so their immigration status would remain in limbo. It would only be by marrying my mother, a poor girl from Dickinson, Texas, and then moving to rural Ohio that he would become a citizen of the United States. In spite of all the carnage, my father was profoundly an assimilative immigrant. During his career, he estimated he delivered over 4000 babies, and more than paid back his debt to the U.S.
The situation in Iran that led him to leaving, though, is accurately described in the book All the Shah’s Men by Stephen Kinzer. Why my father made the choice that he did, at that checkpoint, is given context by Kinzer’s book, and I highly recommend, if you want to understand the current situation, that you read it. In 1953, there was a wave of anti-colonial sentiment moving through this part of the world, and the short version is that populist wave led Mossadegh to get elected. And once elected, he nationalized the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now BP) which then started the intrigues led by our own CIA.
Here is the key point. My father, and his entire country, had just passed through the Depression, as well as WWII. People were literally starving, and my father was righteous. The colonial powers were still controlling key elements of most of the world. Winston Churchill, as former Vice Lord of the Admiralty in Great Britain had over 20 years prior made the monumental decision to move the Royal Navy to being oil-powered instead of coal-powered. And that oil was to come from Iran.
The problem was that then, as now, Iran was split into three primary demographic categories. My father, as a doctor, was one of the urban elites. There was the clerisy and mullahs. And lastly, there were the rural poor, alternately insular, and easily swayed by the mullahs. The difference between the elites my father circulated with (our last name itself means ‘Doctor’ in Farsi) and the current progressive elites running our own country into the ground, was that they circulated with the poor, primarily with military service. My father KNEW the problems of the peasantry in Iran. And while much of his history is extremely fuzzy, one point he made emphatically during my childhood was that while he believed that the poor could be helped, they could not be SAVED. When he made that decision at that checkpoint on that fateful day, he had witnessed the Iranian poor lining up behind the Shah.
And he said “screw it.”
There are all sorts of descriptive holes in my father’s story, that I’ll never know. That he showed up at Ellis Island, supposedly never having seen a flush toilet (likely an apocryphal, funny family myth) is indisputable. His manifest from the S.S. France is below.
But we’ll never know about his larger journey, across Turkey, eastern Europe, and finally France, leading to the port of Le Havre, in France, where he purchased his ticket and sailed to America. Like many people with traumatic pasts, he refused to speak of it, save in those few stories.
Modern Iran has structurally not changed much from the Iran my father lived in, as far as social demographic castes go. There are still the urban elites, who are highly educated. The plight of the peasantry has somewhat improved, though they are still backward and prone to believing in whatever the mullahs tell them. Treatment of women, which used to be abominable in my father’s time (my father’s family had a functional slave girl they had purchased out of humane considerations,) remains terrible, aside from the respite the urban class felt during the Shah’s reign. The old Shah, and his father, were tyrants only barely modified by Western influence. And here’s an interesting catch — the reason that the mullahs hated the Shah so much was for one of the few good things the Shah did — land reform in the countryside, which took away holdings from the faith.
The urban elites currently in Iran are living as Iranians for literal thousands of years have lived — in the context of a hidden, if not exactly secret society. Even after the sanctions, and the turmoil present from 1979 and the Islamic Revolution, the middle class has found ways to get by. Iranians are hooked on education — and unlike most of their Arab cousins, they are serious about it. Requests to study in the U.S. come regularly into my email account at the university. Educated Iranians are not particularly nationalistic at all, and so the various speculations that if the Iranian nuclear sites have been destroyed, the literati will rally to rebuild Iran’s nuclear capacity is highly unlikely. The nuclear program in Iran is a paranoid fantasy of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the mullahs, who like all disordered religious leaders, dream of the apocalypse. The various scientists participate, I believe, somewhat reluctantly. And as with all hostage situations, implicit or explicit, their mania is tempered. And especially so — regardless of whether sites like Fordow have been completely destroyed, you might imagine being a nuclear scientist and walking into that venue and seeing what had to be massive destruction. It’s not going to fire you up to repeat the B-2 scenario on your head. This time, you just got lucky. And for those true believers, there are Mossad agents circulating, anxious to put a bullet in your brain.
Who actually controls Iran will become clear in the weeks to come. I happen to believe that the IRGC has more in common with paranoid English majors at Microsoft than ISIS. Iran is a western venue, and people like their creature comforts. The IRGC knows that without the help of the educated technical elites, there is no functional economy in Iran, and like those English majors, they cannot reproduce, nor maintain the tech. necessary for making the domestic situation work. Pictures I see of the IRGC also indicate a far greater age spread than in a situation like ISIS, which consisted largely of 20-30-something male transplants from across the Islamic world. Revolution sounds great when you’re a 20-something year old loser from Dagestan. Less appealing when you’re 50, and living in a relatively urbanized country like Iran. Remember that the Islamic Revolution has been going on now since 1979. That means the folks that took over the U.S. Embassy have more in common with our idiot boomers at a No Kings rally, worried about losing their version of Social Security, than any fiery idealistic radicalism they possessed in their youth.
One of the things about the current news cycle that is absolutely infuriating to me is the comparison of Iran, and its potentials, to other Arab states. This isn’t some strange point of personal pride. Iran has literally a 4000 year old sedentary culture. Cities are multiple, and highly regionalized. Tehran has a population of 9 million people; Isfahan, close to 2 million, and Mashhad 3 million, to name only a few. Contrast this to Iraq, whose civilization was centered around Baghdad (8 million) or in Libya, Tripoli (~1.3 million). Urban culture — not tribal culture runs Iran, and it has been that way for thousands of years. And it matters. Even in places like the oil-rich UAE, tribal sheikhs sit on top of their dragon pile of gold and skyscrapers. Iran may be benighted by the destructive rule of the mullahs. But it remains a distributed empire, with a strong intellectual component.
One of the other prevailing myths circulating in the argument about Iran is the notion “if we bomb it, they already know how to build it, so they’ll just build it back.” That is emphatically not true — and I’ll put my engineering professor-working in nuclear nonproliferation hat to address it. The most important thing to understand is that there is no new tech in creating a nuclear weapon. Making them small is another thing entirely. But since 1945, the world has known how to make nuclear fire.
The problem with making one, though, is that it requires a complex manufacturing operation to create enough fissile material to make a bomb. And that requires social cohesion and coordination. One of the wildest things I learned about making nuclear weapons is the delivery system is only a modest part of the problem. If you create a bomb, you can load it on a 747, fly it into any major airport, and detonate it. The real problem is creating enough fissile material. And that requires a complex supply chain — with lots of people talking to each other, in a coordinated fashion. Hardly a trivial problem in such a factionalized country, as I’ve described above. When you add a dollop of Mossad agents into the mix, your odds of success drop precipitously. It’s not that it can’t be done. Pakistan showed that it could. But it is non-trivial.
The images in the press of a monolithic culture immediately recovering and pulling this off are false. There is no overarching enemy that most Iranians view in fact. Only the mullahs chanting “Death to America”. All the rest of the Iranian elite want to move to L.A. 700,000 already live there. One of the most taboo subjects to discuss in the US is the effect of brain drain on underdeveloped parts of the world, to developed nations. Do you really think that the 700,000 Iranians living in L.A. were formally peasants in Iran? How might that affect the current dynamic?
One of the most important things for perspective to read are descriptions of the various Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in other countries like Iraq and Libya. Iraq, before the Gulf Wars, was a nation centered in Baghdad, but mostly tribal, with coherence provided by the murderous regime of Saddam Hussein. Libya was not much different, though I happen to have a more ambivalent view toward Muammar Qaddafi. Don’t believe in the factionalized view? Look what happened when those regimes collapsed. Libya now has open slave markets — and that’s a tribal artifact. It’s simply not conceivable in modern Iran — no matter how much you hate the mullahs.
And the nuclear enrichment sites in those two countries? Portraits of mass disarray. I remember descriptions of bundles of tubes found, scattered like chopsticks. And that was without any major bombing. We don’t understand the role of social order in creating manufactured tech. And it shows. There’s a reason, for example, that Taiwan is the center of silicon manufacturing for the world. It’s an outcome of 50 years of social grooming of an entire population to get to the level of discipline and coordination to pull it off. But that kind of thing isn’t easily transferable. Iran has far more tech and ability than its Arab neighbors. I wouldn’t completely discount it. But rebuilding a series of bombed out facilities is not trivial. If you don’t think there’s mass confusion in Iran right now, you’re off your rocker.
Confusion in the information space — years of gaslighting regarding Presidential action — has really created many of the problems in the West in even understanding what’s going on now. My estimated date for mass confusion traces back to the ’80s. But it was truly in high gear by the early ’90s, and was profiled in one of my favorite books by William Greider — Who Will Tell the People? The Betrayal of American Democracy We’ve existed in a gaslit world where we have been so inundated with disordered myths, we can hardly think of any action that might work unless we cut in the elite class to make money off our ignorance.
One of the most prominent was started by Secretary of State, Colin Powell, with his famous quote regarding countries — “If you take a government and you break it, you own it.” What Powell was really advocating for was the nascent growth of the Blob — the NGO-industrial complex deeply involved with ostensible nation-building. USAID-sponsored organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy have always made bank of creating chaos– and so they have.
And it’s the seething from this contingent that is an enormous part of the problem. Trump is using our military at the time of this writing in a hegemonic, punishment-based, but fundamentally goal-based mode. He doesn’t intend to continue the war. He wants to punish Iran enough, and remove enough strike capacity so he doesn’t have to worry about them any more. Think Rome invading Carthage. And while what Powell said isn’t entirely wrong, the notion that we have to put ground troops into Iran to achieve our own goals as a nation is also wrong. Punishment that scares whatever group of elites running the show is not such a bad notion.
And Iran with a bomb is a frightening prospect. You better believe that the upper-class Iranian elites smoking Gitanes and eating baklava won’t be the ones deciding to nuke Tel Aviv. They may be key in making the bomb. But it will be culled fanatics from the IRGC flying the 747 into the city center. We’ve been fighting an 46 year war with Iran already. Taking out a key military capacity is in everyone’s interest.
The deep memetic problem we are actually having is that we’ve had that 40+ years of our own gaslighting governance, which has alternately funneled enormous amounts of money to our own nation’s elites, who continually dream of being let into the club of global power brokers, and the sycophantic press corps wanting to accompany them on their private jets. Someone like Trump is an ice-cold bucket of water over their head, in that he says he’s going to do something, and then acts on it. And then ends our participation.
But the problem goes deeper. Once a public is gaslit long enough, in a complex world, we lose the cognitive ability to even come up with alternate scenarios about what might actually be happening. I was talking to one of my extended network, who is heavily involved in the nuclear sector. We have a publicly accepted scenario regarding Israel’s attacks on Iran that they have been primarily air-directed, with the aim of that campaign to take out Iran’s air defenses, which seems to have worked. But my friend maintains that most of Iran’s air defenses, though, were not taken out from the air. They were taken out by sleeper commandos on the ground. And that there are a whole range of possibilities had Trump not acted to bomb Fordos and Natanz, including commando raids by the Israeli army to remove those threats. Planefuls of commandos could’ve landed in those remote locations and done the job that the bunker busters did in silence and stealth. It could be that Trump was compelled to act, to profoundly mitigate the broader inflammatory scenario of Jewish troops on the rampage inside a Muslim country.
And another surprise twist — along with Iran’s air defenses, apparently the same commandos focused on removing Iran’s attack helicopter fleet, which was an apparent success. Why does this matter? Attack helicopters are key in suppressing any armed rebellion. Perhaps not lethal enough to take on an advanced military, like the US. But plenty powerful enough to annihilate a homegrown insurgent population. It is highly likely that Israeli, as well as US planners, put a homegrown uprising on their bingo card, and created contingencies to make it potentially successful — if it happened.
None of this is surprising for those of us familiar with the capacity, if not the details of US military (as well as Israeli) planning. But we see more profound failure in our press corps, as well as uninformed members on both sides of the Congressional aisle. Intentionally or not, their lack of complexity in their thinking contributes to the crisis. Why? Simplistic messages travel virally far more quickly throughout the media. And no one’s had the chance to make a blockbuster movie on the actual scenario. So the LARP proceeds at the scale of the aggregate public’s awareness.
As I wrap this piece up, it appears that the cease-fire is holding. This is not surprising, as it is highly likely that Iran’s nuclear sites have been destroyed, and their command capacity for making trouble with their Hamas and Hezbollah proxies has been seriously degraded. Further, it appears China has stepped in from behind the scenes and yanked Iran’s chain. As the mullahs and the IRGC do some delicate dance behind the scenes about who is running the show, there appear to be enough elders in the mix who are not completely bonkers, who realize that further degradation of Iranian defense capacity leaves them vulnerable to other neighbors who are none too fond of the constant turmoil, with no apparent end in sight. Just as the Arab world is tiring of the Palestinian cause, the larger circle around Iran is done with the Ayatollah. I think pure, remorseless projection of force has a lot to do with it.
One also starts understanding how much the American NGO community, by blathering on about future monetary opportunities for nation-building, contributes to the unending nature of all these crises. National collapse of Iran is in none of the interests of the primary three demographics I named above. Urban elites are aware of the results of chaos. The IRGC and the mullahs lose their retirement plan. And the rural poor are still bereft, and powerless. There is no land war even for their sons to be drafted into. And the Iran-Iraq War is not that long ago – only 38 years.
So, stay tuned. The plot will likely be far more complicated than you can dream up.
It’s increasingly hard to keep up with any cogent view of the news cycle, in these last couple of weeks in July. Short version — Donald Trump was nearly assassinated on July 13, 2024, at a rally in Butler, PA. The breathless press first didn’t want to admit that Trump was shot, but then that was followed by an endless litany of calls for essentially civil war, especially in the subjunctive (“If Trump had been killed,” for all of those that weren’t forced to study Latin) and then followed on the heels of all this, the announcement by Joe Biden on July 21 that he was dropping out of the presidential race.
Screenshot from CNN after Trump was shot. Even then, CNN was attempting to monkey with the script
Everyone assumes that each of these events are independently momentous, finally, FINALLY leading to some Manichaean conclusion and Götterdämmerung, after which the world will be destroyed and born anew. History must have SOME inflection point, no? The press insists.
But no one’s asking any structural questions on any of this (except for a few voices like this blog.) If Donald Trump had died, how would that civil war actually have taken place? Other than gathering for meetings in the town square, or local park, with their pussy hats, or marching along avenues reserved by the multi-billion dollar entertainment mountebanks known as Black Lives Matter, Americans can’t hardly organize anything political. I have yet to be at a large rally where anyone was collecting names and phone numbers for future contacts. The Old Gods in both parties know this. But the show must go on.
And it does. Geography, as I’ve explained, is functionally dead, save for looting stores in Blue states. What you see on your computer screens, via TikTok, or X, is a postcards-from-the-edge approach to news. Some people manage to get together and break some windows. But more and more, what’s really happening is a slow slide into decay. I visited an old friend in Portland a little more than a month ago. There was some evidence of rioting activity present in downtown Portland. But the biggest sign obvious to me was the lack of shopping in what was once an energetic downtown retail district, as well as miles of dilapidated RVs parked along Lombard Street.
And fat people everywhere, of course. The national obesity rate has passed 42%. The real crisis is in the metabolic health of Americans, as well as a constant slide into poverty and homelessness. As well as the adaptive reality that if you’re going to live in a broken down RV, it’s a whole lot more comfortable to do it someplace where it is warm, and food is still relatively cheap. Folks have some eatin’ to do.
I still marvel at the people in the press claiming that the nation is on the brink of civil war. Wars are physical things, historically fought by young, healthy males. That’s just a statement of fact, with the truth of it aligned in our genes. When all your young males are fat, you’re not fighting anyone. Regardless of how many AR-15s you spread around.
And I still am impressed with the raw stupidity associated with calling January 6, 2021, an insurrection. Do people have any idea how utterly impossible it is to control anything from the U.S. Capitol? The elected officials on salaries of $200K, with a complete complement of near-slaves, in the guise of interns, can’t do it. Insurrections put different people in power that actually command some level of authority and respect. Not dudes with buffalo headdresses made from Gray Owl kits. It is a mystery to me how to get the federal government to do anything. How would the ostensible insurrectionists even know who to call to bark orders or threaten? I’ve said over and over that most people don’t even have any idea where their electricity or water comes from (give yourself a quiz and see if you can accurately answer that question before feeling smug.) “The Grid” is not a valid answer, though I’d be impressed if most people could even say that.
What’s really going on in front of our eyes is what I’ve decided to name a Leaky LARP. LARP stands for Live Action Role Playing game, a combination of re-enactment, storytelling and gaming—players are given a role and act out their character’s actions within an overarching story, from the Merriam-Webster dictionary. The reporters on said LARP are actually intrinsic, and important Non-Player Characters (NPCs) in the game. They certainly can’t comprehend the extent of complexity of modern society themselves. But they do know where they’re supposed to line up with the general story line. And they also know their paycheck depends on them delivering, through clicks and other measures of engagement on the Internet. So the story must be exciting.
The problem is, with all this “through a glass darkly” stuff, is that it’s like a fictional movie that leads with a trailer that says “this movie, while a work of fiction, is based on historical events.” Except those historical events are actually real, and are happening, and usually involve the harm or death of someone in the Real World. It’s all scripted. Until, well, it isn’t. Trump was nearly killed by a 20-year-old male (at least at this current time I’m writing) who set himself up as a LARP-player extraordinaire. The incompetent bureaucracy assigned to President Trump played their part as incompetent bureaucrats, replete with local law enforcement clowns, and DEI agent hires unable to holster their guns. Trump dutifully played his part as well, not dying, of course, but then standing up with the help of agents and raising his fist in the air and mouthing “fight, fight, fight!”
Of all the players in this Leaky LARP, Trump has known he’s a central figure, and his performance didn’t disappoint. Whether he authentically, instantaneously shoved his fist into the air, or did a great piece of improv. doesn’t in the end really matter. When someone nearly blows your head off, at least in my book, they get the benefit of the doubt. Fight, fight, fight it is. He was still a 30 degree twist of his head from getting his brains blown out.
I wrote a piece on Donald Trump back in 2016, right after he was elected the first time. It still holds up, and contains one of my favorite lines I’ve ever written. It’s solid, and I recommend reading it.
But in the larger Theory of Empathetic Evolution scheme of things, he’s just another relational disruptor inside a system declining for other reasons.
And like a play based on characters violating the Fourth Wall with the audience, our LARP only occasionally grounds itself to the outside world in real terms. Bullets hit ears of presidential candidates. Small sections of major urban areas get turned into No-Man’s Lands, with looted Walgreens, or spin-out competitions in intersections. And while the line may seem blurred between fantasy and reality, the other truth is that people actually die, and lives are wrecked in the context of those grounding moments. As Melania Trump’s letter to the American people elegantly stated, Donald Trump has a family too. Regardless of which part of his brain center lifted his fist into the air.
If there’s a takeaway from this, it’s that we need to pay more attention to the backdrop, and less to the scripted moments. Shit never stopped getting real. And it would behoove us to focus on the long line of trailers on Lombard St. in Portland, or the fat folks waddling through the local Walmart — or Food Co-op. Not nearly as exciting — but a telling signal in a pattern of nationwide decline.
It's About Empathy - Connection Ties Us Together 